Why is it important for students to recognize the diversity of local languages across the Middle East?
There is great language diversity in North Africa and the Middle East despite the fact that only Arabic is recognized as the official language. Linguistic diversity reflects the ethnic diversity that exists in a lot of these countries and which dates back hundreds of years. Not until the recent events in Iraq did some people come to know that the Kurds, for example, are a different ethnic group and speak a different language that is not closely related to Arabic. In the case of North Africa, Berber and Arabic languages have coexisted since the arrival of the Arabs and Islam to North Africa in the seventh century. Describe your experience so far in teaching Arabic at UWM. In the Fall of 2006 I taught two sections of first-semester Arabic, both of which were filled last semester. It is very common in language classes to find a fairly good number of students of heritage, but among the 35 students, only three were of Arab descent. This reflects the increasing interest among undergraduate s
